“Then we should waste no time.”
“You will stay then? Even if you feel Her, you will stay?”
Lucius already felt Her. From the moment Margarete began to describe Her, he had felt his skin crawling and had done everything in his power to keep from tearing off his clothes. “We each have our appointed hour,” he mumbled, aware it was something she might say. Something, before this moment, he would never have believed at all.
He shouldered his bag and she led him along one of the paths between the patients. She spoke as they walked. “They are provisionally organized into wards. The nave is where we keep the lesser injuries—the fractures and amputations. We operate within the crossing—the light is best. The south transept is where the dying men are kept, out of sight of the others. The head wounds are in the chancel, where they can be watched.” Lanterns hung at even intervals. He was aware now of the walls, painted with scenes from the Bible. An ark, a serpent, crucifixions set amid what seemed to be Carpathian villages, entwined with Latin verse. Gilded saints above the colonnades. A Last Judgment on the sacristy partition, its tree of fire ornamented with monks and hog-tied sinners, marching on a devil’s tongue.
At the end of the nave, beneath the Annunciation, they stopped. In the floor of the north transept was a crater, nearly a meter deep. A light dusting of snow covered its walls and the steps of a pulpit. Now he realized that the light he had seen earlier was coming from a jagged hole in the high ceiling, poorly patched with wood and tarpaulin. Sister Margarete said nothing.
“What happened?” he asked, pointing.
As she smiled, the wimple pressed into her cheeks. “What happened, Pan Doctor! Well, there is a hole in the ceiling and a crater in the floor.” And she started to laugh as if this was the funniest question she had ever heard.
When he set his bag down by the pulpit, she began to speak again. There were approximately sixty patients in the church of Our Lady of Lemnowice. Most came from the Third Army, though with regiments garrisoned across the mountains, there were others there as well. The most recent truckload of men had arrived the week before—sixteen soldiers, three dead on arrival, five with wounds requiring immediate amputation. Since then it had been silent. The war had moved off, she said. This was its way. Sometimes the fighting was very close and they could hear gunshots, sometimes only distant shells. Once, the Russians had taken the town. Other times, she wondered if they had been forgotten. What a blessing that would be! The town still had a few people left—women only, Ruthenians whose allegiance likely had once been to Russia, until the Russians had taken all the men when they withdrew. The hospital had enough food to last the winter; in addition to the rations last delivered in mid-January, the church had stores of grain and turnips, sunflower seeds, potatoes, beets. As long as supplies continued to come, they could make it through spring, that most difficult of seasons, and come summer there would be apples and pears, and they could work their own fields, and grow wheat…
But Lucius had stopped listening. “Doctor Szőkefalvi left in December?”
“December, Doctor.”
“Two months ago.”
“Yes, two.”
“But you just said there have been amputations?”
“Since December, there have been forty amputations, on twenty-three men, Pan Doctor. Eight legs above the knee, fifteen below. Ten arms above the elbow and six below. One jaw that did not survive.”
Lucius looked at her, his heart beginning to beat faster. “And who, Sister Margarete, has performed the amputations?”
“He has, Pan Doctor,” and she rolled her eyes beatifically toward the hole in the north transept.
Lucius did not drop his gaze. “And whose hand was He directing, Sister?”
She held up her little hands, scarcely half the span of his.
“And are those patients here?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“All that have survived, yes, who have not been evacuated.”
“How many have survived, Dear Sister?”
“Fourteen have survived, Pan Doctor.”
“Fourteen… of twenty-three.” He paused, thinking of the regimental hospitals in Kraków, the daily removal of corpses. “That is not a bad survival rate.”
“No, Doctor.”
“And God has worked by those hands alone?”
A pause, a little smile, as if she understood the impact of what she’d said.
“Sister?”
“God has given us morphine and ether, Doctor.”
“Yes,” said Lucius, staring. “Yes, yes. He has.”
Then she said, “One last thing, Doctor. I have given the men permission to use firearms on the rats, but they must shoot into the floor and not at one another. The typhus, thank God, has abated for now, and we have our procedures for keeping it away. But the rats! Pan Doctor, we are at the mercy of the rats. I have boarded up all the holes in the walls of our church. Sometimes they fall from the hole in the transept, though with winter, this has stopped. Traps have been laid in all corners, but still the creatures come, like mushrooms after a rain, everywhere. You will not be frightened by the occasional shot.”
He thought back to her heaving the crossbar in the narthex.
“Is this why you barred the doors, Sister?”
“Oh, no, Pan Doctor. I barred the doors because of the wolves.”
They made their rounds that night by lantern light.
She announced him, briefly, from the pulpit, with the brevity and authority of a field marshaclass="underline" this was the new medical officer, Krzelewski, from Vienna; there would be no change to procedures, they would continue to round twice daily when not attending to new casualties; questions should, as before, be directed to one of the orderlies, or to herself.
They started in the nave, near the door, in Fractures and Amputations. Traction ropes hung from the roof beams, and little towers of wooden scaffolding with rope and counterweights had been set up on the floor. They were joined by one of the orderlies, Zmudowski, another Pole, with a heavy, red-orange beard. Like Margarete, he wore a greatcoat in the cold of the church. He followed her closely, hovering behind her as she knelt by the first soldier, an Austrian cavalryman crushed beneath his horse the week before. She had amputated his leg above the knee and reset a wrist fracture, and kneeling, she inspected the wounds quickly, showing them to Lucius. She was clearly proud of her stitches, and Lucius, who had never seen a healing amputation site, and certainly not by lantern light, pretended to appraise it with a studious air. Then on, to the next patient, another Austrian, from the Graz fusiliers, shot through the shoulder. She had done little other than stabilize the fracture and suture the exit wound. What else was one to do with a shoulder fracture? But it was healing beautifully, she said affectionately, didn’t Lucius agree?
“Beautifully, yes.”
She looked down again with pride. Then: “Earlier, I heard you can speak German?”
He nodded.
“Please tell him that I saw him playing cards. This is fine. But he is not to use that arm unless he wants to tear the wound open again. We are short of suture material. Next time I will have to use thread from his coat.”
The man nodded somberly as Lucius translated. Then to Margarete, in Polish, Lucius asked, “We are short of sutures?”
“Sutures, no. At least not yet. But the men are like little children. They would eat their laying chicken, as the saying goes. There is no self-restraint. One must be strict.”
They moved on.
“This is Brauer, Pan Doctor Lieutenant, of Vienna, frostbite, both feet; this is Czerny, of the Hungarian Fourteenth Fusiliers, gunshot wound to the left femur, amputated last week; this is Moscowitz, also of Vienna, a tailor, he has been quite helpful to us, bilateral foot amputation, also frostbite, now healing beautifully, as you can see. This is Gruscinski—a Pole. Gangrene of the feet, quite ugly, but God was on his side despite his habit of making pleasure with the whale oil. Kirschmeyer, shell-strike. This is Redlich, a professor in Vienna. He believes a monkey gave birth to a human woman—”